Defining Russia Musically

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The world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin has devoted much of his career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and Soviet music in new and sometimes controversial ways. Defining Russia Musically represents one of his landmark achievements: here Taruskin uses music, together with history and politics, to illustrate the many ways in which Russian national identity has been constructed, both from within Russia and from the Western perspective. He contends that it is through music that the powerful myth of Russia's qnational characterq can best be understood. Russian art music, like Russia itself, Taruskin writes, has qalways [been] tinged or tainted ... with an air of alterity--sensed, exploited, bemoaned, reveled in, traded on, and defended against both from within and from without.q The author's goal is to explore this assumption of otherness in an all-encompassing work that re-creates the cultural contexts of the folksong anthologies of the 1700s, the operas, symphonies, and ballets of the 1800s, the modernist masterpieces of the 1900s, and the hugely fraught but ambiguous products of the Soviet period. Taruskin begins by showing how enlightened aristocrats, reactionary romantics, and the theorists and victims of totalitarianism have variously fashioned their vision of Russian society in musical terms. He then examines how Russia as a whole shaped its identity in contrast to an qEastq during the age of its imperialist expansion, and in contrast to two different musical qWests, q Germany and Italy, during the formative years of its national consciousness. The final section, expanded from a series of Christian Gauss seminars presented at Princeton in 1993, focuses on four individual composers, each characterized both as a self-consciously Russian creator and as a European, and each placed in perspective within a revealing hermeneutic scheme. In the culminating chapters--Chaikovsky and the Human, Scriabin and the Superhuman, Stravinsky and the Subhuman, and Shostakovich and the Inhuman--Taruskin offers especially thought-provoking insights, for example, on Chaikovsky's status as the qlast great eighteenth-century composerq and on Stravinsky's espousal of formalism as a reactionary, literally counterrevolutionary move.National self-definition through music is of course right in the foreground of the
trio of essays in part 2, collected under the rubric aquot;Self and Other.aquot; I hope,
however, that they will serve to complicate rather than simplify the subject or
issue ofanbsp;...

Title

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Defining Russia Musically

Author

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Richard Taruskin

Publisher

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Princeton University Press - 2000

ISBN-13

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